warneat / video-compressor Goto Github PK

(tl;dr) compress your videos in VID_YYYYMMDD_xxxxxx.jpg format into subfolders sorted by years with reduced filesize.
For images, see also: image-compressor

If you run out of storage on your smartphone and don't want to spend hours deleting and sorting out videos, one easy solution is to simply reduce the file-size of your videos on the backup device (Computer/HDD/NAS?) by using this script and shove them back to your phone.

• The naming-Convention VID_YYYYMMDD_xxxxxx.mp4 is assumed (default for most Android Camera-Apps).
• The video_compressor script only deals with .mp4 files.
• By default, file size will be reduced to about 55% of the original size, while maintaining acceptable quality (see also Quality adjustments below).
• No files will be deleted!
• A directory 'VID_compressed' is created which will hold the subdirectories VID_2019, VID_2020 ... per year respectively.
• .mp4 files that have weird numbers after the extension (as i experienced in my case) are copied without changes.
• Files without '.mp4' are being ignored.
• The video-compressor does not run through subdirectories.

Simply place video_compressor.py at the place your videos are sitting and run it.

Eighter install FFMPEG or go through the (horrible) process of compiling it by yourself for proper hardware-acceleration, but regular installation will do:

sudo apt update -y
sudo apt install ffmpeg

or for Mac

brew install ffmpeg

There are discussions about self-compiling it, as people seemed to have experienced bugs (i didn't) or not much speed improvements by doing so.

Anyway, assuming Python (version >= 3.4) is installed, in terminal:

clone this repository, cd into it:

    git clone https://github.com/warneat/video-compressor && cd video-compressor

copy the script to your video folder e.g:

    cp video_compressor.py ~/foo/bar/videos

Optionally, clean up/delete repository with

    cd .. &&  sudo rm -r video-compressor

In your video directory run the script with

    python3 video_compressor.py
or
    ./video_compressor.py

• Install or compile the video processing library FFMPEG
• Download this repository or git clone https://github.com/warneat/video-compressor like above.
• move the video_compressor.py script to desired location and run it from there with python .\video_compressor.py

• FFMPEG takes a -crf argument to set the output quality. Higher values correspond to lower quality. For example 23 reduces the filesize to about 84 % compared to original. Default is 25 (file-size to 58%). They don't recommend values higher than 28 (filesize reduces 42%) Detailed Information about -crf flag

• Lower values (higher output-quality) increase computing time dramatically

  To modify settings:

  • change crf=xx to your liking (line 39)

• FFMPEG really eats up all your computing-power!

• As the processing might take hours or days for a large amount of data, when accessing via remote/ssh you might want to use screen (ultra-quick tutorial) to keep it running in background without an open terminal session.
  In a nutshell: Install it, $screen to start, [do stuff], ctr+a and d to detach. Reattach with $screen -r

• To automate (video) backups e.g Phone to NAS/Cloud-Server/Online-Account... i highly recommend the app FolderSync